I see folks posting on Mastodon, griping that it’s failing, that it’ll never be as popular as Bluesky and Threads because of X and Y, and I’m like, I’m over there chatting to people all day, having a fine time, following new people, picking up new followers, and generally enjoying it more than I ever really enjoyed Twitter.
I don’t really understand why those folks want it to be more than it is.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds. I just wanna be chill, share music recommendations, and enjoy more people interacting with my radio show than ever did on Twitter.
“Oh, but there are no journalists!”
Good? I don’t want endless ragebait posted in my feeds.
I don’t think that’s the kind of “journalism” your strawman desires.
I have no strawman. I had a wickerman, but, well, it’s awkward.
Honestly I find it a little weird that Lemmy is so pro-Mastodon. Like a lot of people when the twitter implosion started I went and parked a username on a few potential replacements. And like a lot of people, when I saw that mastodon was all little specific instances, I didn’t bother because the whole point of twitter is that it’s a big public thing with everybody and everything. I haven’t really seen anybody outside of Lemmy mention mastodon in months. Everyone is going to bluesky.
It’s not that weird, given that they’re both examples of Fediverse software that can (in theory, though not well in practice) interact with each other.
As for Masto being separate instances; I’ve never really had a problem with that. Follow a bunch of people from different servers and you’ll soon begin to federate and link up with other people.
It’s just a completely different use case. It may or may not continue to exist on its own but it will never replace twitter because it does not have the core thing that makes twitter special among social media (the fact that it is essentially “public”). “A bunch of small communities of nerds talking about niche topics” is something you can find friggin anywhere on the internet.
Cool, you crack on using Twitter then.
No. The whole fediverse thing is niche and likely always will be. That might be a good thing though.
Right now, it’s definitely a good thing it’s not popular. We are not in any way shape or form ready for the spam that popular platforms receive.
It’s definitely a good thing. If someone wants to be on the popular platform go back to Reddit or Twitter. That’s what most people want. The Fediverse is the minority that wants something different.
I’d argue plenty of people are simply not aware such alternatives even exist, and don’t bother researching.
Internet could be a different place if more people cared.
With that said, even then we’d probably be in a minority.
It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.
Nah. But it’s already everything I need it to be.
We need to make it popular against all corporate forces like meta, X, bluesky etc. By creating more content and interacting with it more.
Lemmy doesn’t have to be Reddit. Lemmy is Lemmy. Keep coming here and giving it content and it will be all it will ever need to be.
It’s popular enough for me already. I kind of hope it doesn’t become the online site because that will just attract trolls.
I’ve also been using Trust Café (aka WT.Social) but I like the Lemmy UI a lot better.
(thinking of Reddit) God, I hope not."
How do you define popular? I think it already is reasonably popular, I see enough activity here that it prompts me to comment at least somewhere on most days. I think it’s going to become more popular over time.
Yeah I’m pretty happy with its current activity level
If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with “popular” being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear “probably not”.
Current as in today? Or then-current (pre-exodus)?
I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.
My point is that it’s a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don’t think these make sense as targets.
sure. it took reddit 20 years to get to its size.
I think people don’t realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.
Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.
Wait to boot? Back then I had a dozen machines all running 24/7 lol. But I guess the average user on the consumer side yeah.
It also took death of a platform “Digg” to jump start its growth.
And it’s arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.
haha this is not true… dude i was there, digg came/went and little impact on reddits user base
I was there too i was one of the ones that jumped over. I know its a big internet so maybe we both had different experiences. So maybe you are right and the timing was just a correlation and not causation.
reddit used to release page-views and maybe user info (i forget) annually.
there was a bunch of users that jumped over to digg, but they continued to also use reddit. when digg died there was a small bump of digg users, but i dont recall anything noticable in the big subs
Ah I only used Digg and never heard of reddit till Digg died and never joined most of the big subs. But also reddit was so small back then a small bump is a good kick start. Google trends data correlates with what I saw Digg was more search for in 2008 then by 2011 Digg was dead after the 4.0 debacle in 2010 and reddit took off in 2011.
Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.
and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the ‘image macros’ started… memes took over
Obligatory image macros =/= memes.
I remember back when people were so pedantic over that. Happy people don’t really care anymore
it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.
so now we know whom to blame for its enshittification
One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.
Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.
Don’t really care either way, i like it here.
I quite like it too
Oh, of course. We’ll easily be just as popular as Matrix and Mastodon.
sigh
Hey, I had a conversation on Matrix that one time!
And my Mastodon feed has TONS of content from George Takei.
I’ve heard, and I haven’t tried myself, that Matrix has tons of utility between other messaging apps, sending messages to and fro or remote controlling other clients, or moderating large amounts of rooms at once.
It’s nice that it isn’t just for drugs and crypto, tho.
very hot take:
regular people will never get rid of twitter or meta, Facebook. YouTube. it’s incompatible with their psychology.
they need to use what other people are using, they need to see “content” from their followed users
switching to another platform will kill that for them for weeks and stall their “growth”
to be forward thinking and to give up something you’ve had is too much for the average person
which is why I’m on Lemmy: there’s nothing reddit offers to me that makes me “give” it up, it’s always been there but now that there’s competition it’s worth trying something new out
I honestly think id anything Lemmy will have a slow decrease of users until it comes to a halt
I mean, noone used reddit 10 years ago. To a 37 year old like myself, that seems like the reddit shit blew up out of nowhere. Youtube is just a matter of time and outcome of future google break up cases before a legitimate competition comes for its industry share. FB will die with the boomers. The only one I see as a really unmovable object is Twitter because of the universal use by all major sports media/reporting/journalists. It’s the only one with end users applying the platform in any comercial sense outside of marketing. I think the question OP is asking will on the reliance of one of the other platforms falling.
Just my opinion tho so take it with a grain of salt.
Everyone looks at mega businesses as immune to decay. They’re not it just takes longer.
I think “x” may actually be the first to topple though. It’s losing money at an insane rate and that’s with a mega election year propping it up. That’s one of the reasons Elon is pushing Trump so hard, is for the government bail out he’ll get.
You are so fuckin high on the anti Elon hivemind smoke it’s clouding your ability to quantify how much money he has and the fact that X is now an entirely private company. You think he is doing all the Trump shit for a bail out from a government who, has only issued a bailout that applied to privately held companies once in its almlst 250 year existence?
Homie, I think he’s an idiot as much as the next but let’s come down from mars and back to reality. Then we will circle back and cover how much money 250 billion dollars is and how the entire presence of Twitter could leave, bankruptcy the company and still be a massive tax write off without any favorable treatment from DC beyond what perks he already qualifies for by being of the .000000001% tax backracket minority.
It’s losing money at an insane rate and that’s with a mega election year propping it up.
We won’t even make a stink about your typo that twitter’s advertisement revenue stream as being driven by the same mechanisms used to figure out a YouTube influencer’s advertivment revenue stream. We will call it an autocorrect oversight that your comment accidentally says the election attention and resulting increase of user activity affect how much companies pay twitter for its advertising spots and not the number of likes or subscriptions or user visits because they would be insane to agree to terms where the amount they’re invoiced is dependent on statistics that can’t decipher between bot accounts and active user accounts.
If ya made it to the end of this and your take away is that I’m a Elon stan, re-read it or tell me why because I cognizantly tried to make sure none of my over the top satirical statements made in this reply would tip a hat or give any slight implications that would credit Elon for being a shrewd or competent business owner. I’m just sick of the fuck Elon hivemind ignoring very objective facts about how shit works in lazy replies only intended to get their shot in at beating the dead horse named Elon’s and Idiot.
JFC, that is a lot of uneducated nonsense. “X” is losing 400-500 million a year, we know this from companies that lent him money and are public. I never said Elon would go bankrupt just “X”. Trump has constantly done anything he wants without care to precedence and has shown that he’ll do anything for a dollar. He also is a dementia laden fool that can be led around like a puppy right now.
I never said Elon was an idiot, that’s why I think he’ll get Trump to bail “X” out. Specifically because you don’t get that rich by losing money or passing up a chance to earn the kind of money he can off of Trump.
I really don’t think so. The vast majority of internet users just stick with whatever simple thing that serves their need. Lemmy isn’t the most difficult thing, but if reddit already exists and is more popular then people won’t be leaving that for this if they haven’t already.
The boost in people coming here last year was a “last straw” kind of deal from people using reddit who cared enough about not supporting their shit decisions, but by now that has died down and we’ve seen from recent articles that reddit “won” and they have a metric fuckton of users.
Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.
I think the only thing that would 100% kill Reddit is a paid subscription, anything other than that I don’t see it.
TV has proven that people are willing to tolerate an amazing amount of ads too. I wonder if you could crank up the ads to posts ratio to something like 90% and still have enough users.
the place is infested with bots, and that’s probably “winning” to them.
I think we’re going to need to start by defining what “popular” means.
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled “Lemmy users.”)
If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.
So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that’s extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we’re already there.
Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren’t oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I’m pretty happy with it.
Although I will concede that I’m as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.
462k are the people that have created an account, Lemmy actually has ~40k active users (and even then “active” just means they logged in once this month). I do share the sentiment that not everything has to be super popular but Lemmy really could use more people.
I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn’t trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it’s worth, it’s not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy’s smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you’re looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.
Might consider that a lot of people have alts, maybe even 5+ alts, and there are a lot of bots.
40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.
I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.
This right here
I’m gonna say yes, for the exercise.
Four assumptions:
- Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
- Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
- Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
- Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.
If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won’t take over then, but it’ll stick around.
The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won’t. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it’s alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.
If the API fiasco hasn’t really deterred enough Reddit users to convert, then almost nothing will. Except maybe when Spez gets around to monetizing NSFW subreddits and subreddits in general that are very large. But even then, I still say it won’t be a giant deal. They’ll come here but they’ll want the Fediverse to strongly appeal to NSFW content and really the Fediverse is fine without it poisoning itself with that filth.
Wait until they kill old.reddit
Can’t say I agree with NSFW content being “filth”, but I would agree that generally it’s harder for NSFW content to find a home over here due to the increased moderation costs it brings.
We don’t need the coomers here. We just don’t.
I also would not think of it as filth, but I also love its absence in Lemmy. Because that stuff acts like an STD and spreads and grows, and I’d rather just leave it out.
Does it currently make a profit? If not they will find ways to make it worse. And even if they do make a profit chances are they’ll want to increase their margins.
Maybe stuff like the Google deal could keep money pouring in while keeping usability at a respectable level though.
